Helpful Reloading Hobbyists Continue to Bless

I am being criticized by the reloading mystics again! Someone linked to me from a forum, and the Sadducees there are up in arms because–like thousands of other people–I had problems with the lame manual Hornady provided with the Lock-N-Load press! I’ll translate their criticisms briefly: we are cool. The bathrooms in our trailers have tactical toilet seats. We sign onto Ebay and bid on Rob Leatham’s dirty socks. You will never be as smart as we are, regardless of how many times we failed the biased GED exam. So instead of helping, we will insult you and try to feel even better about ourselves than we already do.

Okay, whatever. When I blog, my goal isn’t to please the self-righteous (not counting myself) and stingy.

One of these guys accused me of being an engineer! That hurts. The Nazis used to call Einstein an engineer in order to put him down. Besides, if I were an engineer, I might have some actual practical knowledge.

He probably doesn’t have the education to know the difference between an engineer and a physicist. He probably thinks a guy who fixes TVs is a physicist.

When I studied physics, very little of what I did involved handling physical objects. I learned how to put simple electronic devices together, but that’s about it. When I taught lab classes, the most complicated thing I operated was one of those machines optometrists use to test vision. Don’t ask me how it works. I don’t remember a thing, except the word “diopter.” Physics is mostly theory. An unfortunate consequence is that physicists will sometimes come up with conclusions that seem to make sense on paper, but which are ridiculous in real life.

I’ll give an example. When I taught, the grad students were expected to write questions for the final exam. One girl wrote a question about a cone-shaped iceberg, asking how far down it would ride in the water. And she assumed it would float with the point up and the base down. I pointed out that the other end would probably be at the top. An iceberg with a small top would be unstable; it would be impossible for it to remain in that position. And we were both wrong. Yes, it would have been stable in the position I described. But not too stable. Far and away, the most likely orientation would be horizontal. And the calculus involved in determining the submerged volume would have been way too hard for the students. The formula for the volume of a cone is simple. But a sliver of the side of a cone, carved off at an angle? Off the top of my head, I have no idea what it would be.

I was the only grad student who noticed the problem, and the rest probably have Ph.Ds now. Be glad they’re not engineers, designing bridges you use to get to work.

It’s funny how some hobbies attract jerks and others attract nice people. Let’s see. Oddly, when I played bluegrass, I ran into a surprising number of obnoxious people. Homebrewers seem nice, probably because they’re always drunk. Fishermen are the worst; maybe the constant sensations of desperation and failure make them vicious. I really can’t stand serious fishermen. Boxers and other martial artists generally seem polite. People who play classical piano are stuffy and irritable. Cooks are generally pleasant; chefs are not. Math and science seem to attract utterly foul individuals as well as people who are humble and friendly in spite of their grotesquely oversized mental hardware.

Most people I’ve met at the gun range have been very decent, although the employees can be a real test of patience. I have wondered if people have been polite to me simply because they’ve seen that I shoot a lot better than they do, but I’ve found that rifle people are generally okay, and I have not accomplished much with rifles.

The peculiar thing about gun people is that people who can’t shoot are sometimes among the most unpleasant. Maybe a cultivated air of superiority is a means of compensating for a lack of ability. Which is odd, because ultimately, it’s all about who can make the bullets go where they’re supposed to. Everything else is peripheral.

I’m beginning to think I should give up on the case-activated powder measure. People keep telling me it’s sensitive to the way you pull the lever. Oddly, this fact is not emphasized in bright red letters on the box, nor does either manual say anything about it. I get the impression that the charge is the thing that is most likely to fail and destroy your gun. People talk a lot about overfilled and underfilled cases.

Most of my rounds end up going through the same hole. After fifteen shots or so, I generally don’t get good feedback–entire new holes–indicating that the bullets have left the gun. So if I fired a slug halfway down the barrel, unless I felt a difference in the gun’s motion, I would probably be unaware of the problem. I might shoot another one right behind it. Which would be bad. Maybe the best thing is to load the powder into the casings by hand. The problem with that is that I’ll have to run them through the press twice. Once to size, decap, and prime, and once to seat the bullet and do the crimp. In between, I’ll have to take the cases out and fill them. Otherwise, the powder may run out through the primer holes.

Oh, well. I’d have ridiculously consistent and reliable ammunition. That counts for something.

Some people have suggested I write new instructions for the press. That would be a good idea, if I had any idea what I was doing. I think I should write notes for my own use. I suppose once I understand reloading, I could polish my notes up and make a PDF available. Right now, the only advice I can give is, don’t even consider it unless you want to devote a lot of time and money to it. Everyone who says it’s simple is lying in order to impress you with their skill, or just mistaken. It may seem simple to them. Hey, calculus seemed simple to me. Bouncing a golf ball on the face of an iron and then hitting it in the air, so it heads for the green, seems simple to Tiger Woods. Odds are, you will see these things differently.

The final bunch of reloading crap will arrive soon. After that, I will know what I’m up against.